Under Solomon’s Throne

Morgan Y. Liu provides a rare ground-level analysis of post-Soviet Central Asia’s social and political paradoxes by focusing on an urban ethnic community: the Uzbeks in Osh, Kyrgyzstan, who have maintained visions of societal renewal throughout economic upheaval, political discrimination, and massive violence. This study examines the culturally specific ways that Osh Uzbeks are making sense of their post-Soviet dilemmas. These practices reveal deep connections with Soviet and Islamic sensibilities and with everyday acts of dwelling in urban neighborhoods. Osh Uzbeks engage the spaces of their city to shape their orientations relative to the wider world, postsocialist transformations, Islamic piety, moral personhood, and effective leadership.

Title Page

Copyright

Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Notes on Fieldwork

Introduction

The tale of one city can tell a story about a society, a region, and a historical
moment. The story told here is about how an urban community responded to
a political dilemma for two decades and how the community’s response offers
broader insight on Central Asia after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Since then, ethnic Uzbeks in the city of Osh have lived as citizens of independent...

1. Bazaar and Mediation

Osh may fail to stand out as a beautiful city in the eyes of the average Western
tourist. Beyond the imposing Solomon Mountain (fig. 2) at its center, the
cityscape offers few striking elements. Yet the city is fascinating for the dense
social worlds that it assembles, juxtaposes, and tucks away within its urban...

2. Border and Post-Soviet Predicament

Being Uzbek in post-Soviet Osh means living between contradictions. The
lives of Osh Uzbeks are caught between overlapping pairs of oppositions that
define their post-Soviet predicament. They are doubly excluded by the two
nation-states with which they are most connected, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan...

3. Divided City and Relating to the State

Osh appears to tell a tale of two cities. It is often seen as a city divided into
two distinct halves: an ancient Central Asian core (mahalla neighborhoods,
hand-built houses, narrow streets, bazaars) and a modern Soviet city (boulevards,
shops, government buildings, institutions, parks, Lenin statues). Indeed,...

4. Neighborhood and Making Proper Persons

A neighborhood is more than a place to live. Inhabited places are always
saturated with a wide range of human concern, whether through narrative
about them or engagement in everyday acts of dwelling in them (Casey 1997).
Places gather material things, experiences, thoughts, dispositions, habits, concerns,
and their histories into particular local configurations that can become...

5. House and Dwelling in the World

The mahalla is a potent idiom of virtuous character and moral community.
The idiom allows Osh Uzbeks to ponder and attempt to practice the kind of
collective life that they believe is key to renewing society for a better future.
Understanding this view allows us to appreciate why so many Osh Uzbeks...

6. Republic and Virtuous Leadership

At a Russian restaurant in Osh one summer day in 1999, a young Uzbek man
eloquently summarized for me why the republic of Uzbekistan was so much
on the minds of Uzbeks in Osh at the time. Nurolim stood out as the most cosmopolitan
individual of all my friends in the city. He spoke fluent, idiomatic...

Conclusion: Central Asian Visions of Societal Renewal

Osh Uzbeks have responded in a particular way to their political predicament
since Kyrgyzstan’s independence in 1991. They make sense of their
dilemmas and conceive of solutions to them by “thinking with” their city
through idioms that are rooted in the actual spaces of Osh and its surroundings...

Welcome to Project MUSE

Use the simple Search box at the top of the page or the Advanced Search linked from the top of the page to find book and journal content. Refine results with the filtering options on the left side of the Advanced Search page or on your search results page. Click the Browse box to see a selection of books and journals by: Research Area, Titles A-Z, Publisher, Books only, or Journals only.